Forbidden Fruits. No. 2.

I think I already have a 'Forbidden Fruits' post buried somewhere back there between 2007 and now. If I don't, then I ultimately should. This post is dedicated to my friend Clarissa, who told me at age 14 that 'you will always be chasing forbidden fruit'. It took me a few more years to live up to the prophecy, but there you have it.

'How to end a Lacanian Analysis or How to 'Come' to Forbidden Fruits' is an article by Gillian Straker, an Australian Lacanian analyst of South African origins. The article was published in the Australian Journal of Psychotherapy in Vol 26:2 in 2007:

http://www.ajppsychotherapy.com/26-2-essays/gillian-straker.html

The article sets out some basic terminology as used by Lacan. Straker humbly acknowledges that systematising Lacan does little credit to the complexity his work, and indeed would be an anathema to the man himself. Resolute, she offers us a subjective understanding of Lacan's theory from the perspective of analysand. I like her approach - she uses terminology that is inclusive, and that addresses me, the reader.

Straker introduces us to the notion that we are born desired, and therefore, inevitably, are born misrecognised. The projections of the mother onto the child (of what the child's needs are, of what the child will become when the child is grown) plus the birth of the child into a given language and a given cultural milieu results in an interpolation of ourselves into the discourse, already established, of the Other. Through this means we become 'barred subjects' - subjects with an unconscious. The unconscious is constituted as an effect of language by Lacan - an amount is required to be ignored in order to make an utterance. The one who makes the statement and the one who is framed by an enunciation, while being the same person, are not reducible to each other (this is so resonant with Foucault).

Lacan's model of the ego is painted by Straker as both an internalisation of an image and an imaginary projection of the body. This psychical anatomy will be coloured by 'lines of parental and familial signification' and even though it will often be at odds with reality, the child, confronting his mirror image, jubilantly misrecognises herself, on the way to becoming interpolated into the discourse of the Other. This discourse by necessity comes from outside, it is 'extimate' not intimate, and it's slow steady adoption not without significant trauma.

Trauma is indeed considered therapeutic in this Lacanian model offered by Straker - a perfect attunement of (m)other to child is considered to render the relationship as problematic, with psychosis as a likely outcome, because growth requires desire, to fill the 'gaps' of lack. Desire will not arise in a symbiotic state. A perfectly aligned (m)other forecloses on agency, and in no way enables the development of subjectivity.

For Lacan, the 'Other' is the imaginary register or the world of identification and the image - the symbolic order of law, language and kinship. It is extimate - the foreign or alien that is within us. 'Language, law and kinship' speak through the mother to the child, but they exceed her. The way they act upon the child, through her, will depend on how and to what extent the mother has negotiated her own relationship between jouissance and desire. I'll come back to jouissance and desire in the next post.

A mother's response to her infant reflects her own imaginary relations, and the circuit between mother and baby is only broken by the 'name' of the father. In the ternary relationship (mother, child and mother's desire for the child) the paternal figure enters as a fourth, rescuing the baby from fusion with the mother by leading the child 'out' in two ways - limiting the mother's desire for the baby (by channelling some of her desire towards himself) and naming the mother's desire (popping the incest taboo on the table). Without these limits, the structure of the psychotic may take hold within the child. Perversion may be the outcome if the limitation is in place, but the naming of desire is absent, and neurosis is likely for the opposite relations.

Jouissance is pleasure in pain, and pain in pleasure. It is connected with the death drive, seeking pleasure beyond the pleasure principle (which is the title of the next book I need to read). It ties in with Bataille's perspective on the erotic as a realm of violence which 'borders on death itself' - it can also be compared to the mystical experience.

Jouissance must ultimately be refused in order to encounter it, once again, on an inverted ladder of the law of desire. Odysseus strapped to the mast of the boat so that he can sail close enough to the rocks to be pleasured by the siren's song is about as vivid an image as is needed to call forth the sense of the ignition of desire, and the devouring nature of the passion of jouissance.

We can become neurotics who languish on the ladder or perverts who sting themselves with jouissance, or psychotics who founder in the realm of the 'Real' and never enter into the Symbolic at all. Desire longs for that which is absent and is killed by satisfaction. Desire arises in a relation between need and demand. Jouissance enjoys what is present - but to a 'deathly' outcome for the self - desiring either what the other has, or to be the other.

Hmm. I need to spend a bit more time with the Real and the Imaginary and Symbolic realms, to untwine the method by which love appears in this configuration. Time for a 'to be continued'.